Touch sensitive devices have become popular as input devices to computing systems due to their ease and versatility of operation as well as their declining price. A touch sensitive device can include a touch sensor panel, which can be a clear panel with a touch sensitive surface, and a display device, such as a liquid crystal display (LCD), that can be positioned partially or fully behind the panel or integrated with the panel so that the touch sensitive surface can cover at least a portion of the viewable area of the display device. The touch sensitive device can allow a user to perform various functions by touching the touch sensor panel using a finger, stylus or other object at a location often dictated by a user interface (UI) being displayed by the display device. In general, the touch sensitive device can recognize a touch event and the position of the touch event on the touch sensor panel, and the computing system can then interpret the touch event in accordance with the display appearing at the time of the touch event, and thereafter can perform one or more actions based on the touch event.
One type of touch sensor panel that can be used is a capacitive touch sensor panel. Typical capacitive touch sensor panels can include a grid formed by rows of drive lines intersecting columns of sense lines. The drive lines can be driven by stimulation signals that cause the capacitively coupled sense lines to generate output touch signals representative of touch events detected on the surface of the panel. These drive lines and sense columns can be routed along the edge of a touch sensitive device to drive and sense circuitry, respectively. The thickness of the border around the edges of the touch sensitive device can depend on the number of drive lines, the number of sense lines, and the distances between each line. As touch sensitive devices continue to get smaller, it is desirable to reduce these distances between the drive and sense lines.
Conventionally, the drive lines and sense lines can be fabricated on the touch sensor panel using various processes, such as lithography, printing, or laser ablation. However, lithography and printing typically result in large distances between lines, and are thus in some circumstances undesirable for generating devices with thin borders. Laser ablation, on the other hand, allows for much finer patterning of the line material. However, the laser ablation process can damage the underlying substrate when patterning a line material having a high ablation fluence value, such as indium tin oxide (ITO).